New Guild Wars 2 Class Revealed

It’s called ‘the revenant.’

Guild Wars 2 is slated to get its first expansion, Heart of Thorns, some time soon, and one of the things that the expansion will be adding to the hit MMORPG is a brand new class (or profession, in the game’s own parlance). It’s called the ‘Revenant,’ and it sounds pretty interesting.

“We talked a lot about where we’d been going with Guild Wars 2’s professions,” said ArenaNet game design lead Jon Peters to Polygon. “We were moving further and further away from Guild Wars 1. We looked at our whole set of eight professions and tried to figure out what archetype was missing. It took us back into our past. We started looking backward at the first game.”

This will play into gameplay as a mechanic where you channel the power of heroes and notable figures from the first Guild Wars game, all of which are important historical and legendary figures in this game’s lore. A hero from the first game, whom the Revenant will channel, will show up as the right half of your skill bar- the benefit being that theoretically, you can use a skill on your left hand side, and then switch to the right hand side, channel a hero from the past, and use a similar skill that that hero may have had without suffering any kind of cooldown penalty.

“Legends were designed as packages of skills for very specific playstyles,” says ArenaNet game designer Roy Cronacher. “One legend might be focused being tanky, while another is focused around conditions. The idea is that you bring this package of skills that has a themed playstyle. You make that choice of whether you want to be an offensive-style character or do you want to use conditions or do you want to be a tank or do you want to do support. By having two legends equipped, it allows you to mix and match these playstyles and build a hybrid role.”

So, it sounds like it’s a pretty interesting and differentiated class, and it should be something that all Guild Wars 2 players will be looking at. How about you? Does this sound like something that would interest you?